04.19.2017 ​PR Newswire

​ExaGrid Version 5.0 Adds Advanced Support for Oracle RMAN Channels, Veeam SOBR, and Replication to AWS

ExaGrid®, a leading provider of next generation disk-based backup storage with data deduplication solutions, today announced its newly-released Version 5.0 that now provides advanced support for Oracle RMAN Channels, Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR), and replication to Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud for disaster recovery.

ExaGrid v5.0 allows its Oracle RMAN customers to use Oracle RMAN Channels with up to 25 appliances in an ExaGrid scale-out GRID system. "Sections" of data are sent to each appliance in parallel for improved performance and also for performance load balancing as RMAN Channels will send the next section of data to the next available appliance in the GRID. Unlike first generation scale-up deduplication appliances that have a single front-end controller and simply add disk shelves, each ExaGrid appliance includes CPU, memory, network ports, and disk. If any appliance fails in the GRID, RMAN Channels continues to send backup data to the remaining appliances. In the scale-up model, if the front-end controller fails, all backups stop. With ExaGrid's scale-out appliances in a GRID and its global deduplication across the GRID coupled with RMAN Channels, if any appliance fails, the backups will continue uninterrupted with a natural failover approach. ExaGrid can take in up to a total of 1PB of database data or a single 1PB database into a single GRID. In addition, ExaGrid's unique landing zone maintains the most recent backups in their undeduplicated native form for fast Oracle database restores, and all longer-term retention is kept in a deduplicated repository.

"Oracle database administrators and backup administrators struggle to have fast Oracle backups and even more so fast restores," said Bill Andrews ExaGrid's President and CEO. "ExaGrid v5.0 is the first backup storage solution that provides fast backups at a rate of up to 200TB/hour per PB and fast restores with the ExaGrid landing zone coupled with performance load balancing and failover when working with Oracle RMAN. There is no solution on the market that will come close to the ExaGrid approach for Oracle RMAN."

ExaGrid's v5.0 also supports Veeam's newly-announced SOBR, which allows backup administrators using Veeam to direct all jobs to a single repository made up of ExaGrid shares across multiple ExaGrid appliances in a scale-out GRID, automating job management to ExaGrid appliances. ExaGrid's support of SOBR also automates the addition of appliances into an ExaGrid system as data grows by simply adding appliances to a Veeam repository group. The combination of Veeam SOBR and ExaGrid's appliances in a scale-out GRID creates a tightly integrated end-to-end backup solution that allows backup administrators to leverage the advantages of scale-out in both the backup application as well as the backup storage. The combination of Veeam backups to the ExaGrid landing zone, the integrated ExaGrid-Veeam Accelerated Data Mover, and ExaGrid's support of Veeam SOBR is the most a very tightly integrated solution on the market for a scale-out backup application to scale-out backup storage.

"ExaGrid continues to deepen its product integration with Veeam, driving unrivaled performance and value for the Always On Enterprise," said Bill Andrews, ExaGrid's President and CEO. "ExaGrid's scale-out architecture when combined with Veeam SOBR delivers limitless scalability and effectively removes the obstacles to data growth encountered in first generation scale-up storage approaches, which can be costly and disruptive, particularly in larger data center environments."

In addition, v5.0 also includes support for replicating from the primary site ExaGrid backup system to AWS for offsite disaster recovery. ExaGrid has always supported second-site replication from data center to data center and now also supports data center replication to AWS. ExaGrid's approach of using an ExaGrid VM in AWS to AWS storage preserves many ExaGrid features when replicating to AWS, such as a single user interface for the onsite ExaGrid and the data in AWS, replication encryption, and bandwidth set and throttle. In addition, the v5.0 release supports encryption of data at rest in AWS. In the event of a disaster recovery, the backup application running in AWS or at a customer's data center recovery site can request the data from the ExaGrid VM in Amazon for restores to any location. ExaGrid has complete support for disaster recovery to an ExaGrid at a second data center, to a rented third party data center, to an ExaGrid at hybrid cloud providers, and now to the public cloud.

"IT needs a new strategy, one that meets its expectations while also paving the way for true organizational resilience," said George Crump, Founder and President of Storage Switzerland, a leading IT analyst firm. "ExaGrid continues to demonstrate that it is one of those companies with the right technology at the right time. Its landing zone feature seems tailor-made to solve both backup and recovery performance issues, and its choice of a scale-out architecture is ideal for the use case. The scalability that ExaGrid's systems provide enables customers to keep pace with their expanding data volumes without sacrificing performance, and release of its v5.0 continues the company's push to build and deliver what IT data centers truly need for backup storage."

In addition to support for Oracle RMAN Channels, Veeam SOBR, and AWS, v5.0 also extends its support for Veritas OST to include ExaGrid appliances as target backup storage for the NetBackup 5200 and 5300 series of media server appliances. ExaGrid's implementation has been Veritas certified. In addition, ExaGrid has also extended in Veritas NetBackup OST implementations to include support of NetBackup media servers running IBM AIX.

With comprehensive security concerns constantly on the rise ExaGrid, has tightened its prevention of and recovery from ransomware attacks.

SMB signing can be enabled for ExaGrid shares, requiring Windows account credentials to be authenticated and authorized before access is granted

Each ExaGrid server runs a proper firewall and a customized Linux distribution that only opens ports and runs only the services necessary for receiving backups, web-based GUI, and ExaGrid-to-ExaGrid replication.

Communications between ExaGrid servers is secured using Kerberos authorization and authentication, protecting from a "man in the middle" attack from malicious users or software.

If the primary storage is compromised, restores from ExaGrid are up to 20 times faster than any other deduplication appliance as ExaGrid stores the most recent backup in an undeduplicated form avoiding the data rehydration penalty of only storing deduplicated data. Users are back online faster.